Newmark Adds National Leasing Group Focused Solely On Tech Tenants

One of the largest commercial real estate brokerages will devote a part of its company solely to finding office space for tech tenants across the U.S.

Newmark is launching a 250-person team, dubbed the Technology and Innovation Practice Group, which will represent tech tenants of all sizes in 30 markets, Bisnow has learned. The brokers and real estate professionals are joining together from local offices around the country to form the national group.

“This group combines each member’s well-established market intelligence and strong relationships across the industry to streamline and strengthen a wide range of real estate solutions for our clients,” Newmark President and Head of Investor Services Jimmy Kuhn said in a statement. 

The group is already representing some of the largest tech companies, as well as small and midsized businesses, New York-based Vice Chairman Ben Shapiro, one of the new group's leaders, told Bisnow in an interview. 

Shapiro will steer the group with San Francisco-based Vice Chairman Elizabeth Hart, Vice Chairman Andrew Blaustein, based in Denver, and Vice Chairman Jennifer Frisk, based in Los Angeles. While the group's leaders are in the largest tech markets, it will also have members in emerging hubs like Pittsburgh, San Diego, Nashville and North Carolina's Research Triangle.

“The formation of the Technology & Innovation Practice Group allows Newmark to apply its expertise to complement the next-generation workplace, cultivating a variety of best practices to advance the tech industry’s ethos across the globe,” Hart said in a statement about the new group. 

The group was formed after Kuhn took on the role of head of investor services and transformed Newmark's investment sales platform from silos in local markets to a national approach, Shapiro said.

“There’s immense success in our national investment sales platform because of our one-team, one-country, client-first approach,” he said. 

Newmark's new group comes amid an office identity crisis for the technology sector. Companies are still figuring out what their footprints will look like when their employees return to the office and many are thinking about hybrid options.

Several technology companies have downsized their requirements by tens of thousands of feet while looking for new space in Midtown South, which has been a mecca for technology companies and startups looking to grow in Manhattan. In recent years, the largest tech companies have come of age as key drivers of the stock market. They have leased massive spaces in New York City's most expensive neighborhoods. 

“What I'm interested to see is how the next phase of tech will think about the office. Part of the tech ethos was a low-key, 'We were a garage startup, we don't wear suits, it's a very dress down, we-not-me culture,'" Shapiro said. “So you have that underlying ethos met with the fact that Facebook just took a million feet in the biggest — one of the biggest, shiniest glass towers in New York City … As tech companies become the world's biggest companies, how do they keep their authenticity?”